How to Watch High Quality Videos on YouTube

I heard about this the other day, but I’m glad that Michael found the time to write up the ‘how to’ for it. He goes the handle ‘RottNKorpse’ in the chat room.

Don’t you just hate how low the quality of the videos are on YouTube? I certainly do, but thankfully there is a way to get around the default quality and watch videos in a much higher quality. However, there are catches to this… like everything really. :|

First, I am going to explain how to do this and then I will explain the flaws/catches to it. You start off with a basic YouTube URL, then you add the High Quality code at the end of it: &fmt=18. An example might look like:

As you can see, you will get a much higher quality video through the wonders of YouTube.

So far, I have only found 2 flaws / limitations, but the most important limitation is this will NOT work on videos that are encoded from .FLV files before they are uploaded to YouTube. The other flaw is that on some occasions the audio and video will desync when using this feature. It doesn’t happen very often but it does happen.

If you’re logged in to YouTube anyway, just head over to your Account settings page. Near the bottom, you’ll find a “Video Quality” option. Click that link and you’ll land on a page where you can choose to always see the higher quality videos. Obviously, this requires you to login to YouTube, so if you don’t want to do that, just stick with one of the methods above.